In the 21st century communicating and knowledge is the key for productivity and growth of one’s country. In this Era, the social networking services, SNS, plays important role in letting people share ideas and communicate for better future. Many people no longer send conventional text message to their extensive circle of friends in South Korea. Rather, they elect to use a mobile messenger.
Agerigna( http://www.agerigna.com/) is an Ethiopian version of mobile messengerdeveloped by Ethiopian students attending Korea’s Universities. Agerigna, a SNS application, is created to enable Ethiopian peoples to communicate and share ideas using the smartphones and computers. It is designed to help Ethiopian people better communicate with their mobile devices in their own language, Amharic.
Agerigna is the first Amharic enabled SNS smartphone application. New version of the explosively growth in recent, Agerigna has attracted over 23,000 subscribers from all over the world and the figure is expected to surge as the number of mobile users in Ethiopia has been on the rise, Agerigna Amharic Keyboard is only 163 days 67,800 people to download from Google market It is a wonderful record. particularly in urban areas. Last year, the number reached 18 million, with 3.4 million of them having access the Internet. Moreover, the Ethiopian government displayed strong willingness to upgrade its 3G-infrastructure network.
Agerigna is not limited to only SNS service, after long research and studding the structure and construction of Amharic language characters, the Agerigna team succeeded to develop an efficient soft keyboard or IME (input method editor) for android smartphones. Since its first release on last December, the Agerigna Amharic Keyboard is downloaded 163 days 67,800 people and the figure is expected to grow when the keyboard is available as embedded on smartphones. (https://play.google.com/store/apps/detailsid=com.agerigna.keyboard&hl=ko)
We believe that Ethiopian peoples can benefit from Agerigna since it lets them to socialize and communicate using their own language. We also believe that Agerigna applications will also make big influence on smartphone manufacturing companies to include the Amharic Keyboard in their smartphones products. Agerigna, like any other social networking smartphone applications, has major functions that allow users to share and communicate information. Here I will try to describe the major functionalities that are provided by the Agerigna smartphone application.
Particularly, Agerigna allows the users to search for other users using their name or email addresses. Then, the user can make a friendship request and start communicating.and in Agerigna, each user has its own story. A user my post a photo (picture) in his/her story board. In addition, the users can see a friend’s story and put a comment or like the story. We are Agerigna give users a possibility to apply different type of effect on their photo before posting to their story board. Ever Agerigna allows users to communicate with their friends using a chat. The users can use the embedded Agerigna Amharic keyboard to write Amharic characters in their chat messages.
Easily, Agerigna provides the users with several notifications, such as chat messages notification, story comments and likes notifications. Agerigna,it has a setting functionality for setting ring tones, changing language, setting keyboard input types,( imubiquitous@gmail.com)
